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DEVOTIONAL 


The Life that Wins 


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An Address (Revised) by CHARLES 
GALLAUDET TRUMBULL before the 
National Convention of the Presby- 
terian Brotherhood of America 


COPYRIGHT, 1911, 
BY THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TIMES Co, 


PHILADELPHIA: 
THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TIMES Co, 


3 cents each; 30 cents a dozen. 


THE LIFE THAT WINS. 


HERE is only one life that wins; 
and that is the life of Jesus 

Christ. Every man may have 

that life; every man may live 
that life. 

I do not mean that every man may 
be Christlike; I mean something very 
much better than that. I do not mean 
that a man may always have Christ’s 
help; I mean something better than that. 
I do not mean that a man may have 
power from Christ; I mean something 
very much better than power. And I 
do not mean that a man shall be saved 
from his sins and kept from sinning; I 
mean something better than even that 
victory. 

To explain what I do mean, I must 
simply tell you a very personal and 
recent experience of my own. I think 
I am correct when I say that I have 
known more than most men know 
about failure, about betrayals and dis- 
honorings of Christ, about disobedience 
to heavenly visions, about conscious 


3 


fallings short of that which I saw other 
men attaining, and which I knew Christ 
was expecting of me. Not a great while 
ago I should have had to stop just there, 
and say simply I hoped that some day 
I would be led out of all that into 
something better. If you had asked me 
how, I would have had to say I did not 
know. But, thanks be to His long- 
suffering patience and infinite love and 
mercy, I do not have to stop there, but I 
can go on to speak of something more 
than a miserable story of personal failure 
and disappointment. 

The conscious needs of my life, before 
there came the new experience of Christ, 
of which I would tell you, were definite 
enough. Three in particular stand out: 

1. There were great fluctuations in my 
spiritual life, in my conscious closeness 
of fellowship with God. Sometimes I 
would be on the heights spiritually; 
sometimes I would be in the depths. 
A strong, arousing convention; a stirring 
address from some consecrated, victo- 
rious Christian like Speer or Mott; a 
searching, Spirit-filled book, or the ob- 
ligation to do a difficult piece of Christian 
service myself, with the preparation in 
prayer that it involved, would lift me up; 
and I would stay up—for a while—and 
God would seem very close and my 


4 


spiritual life deep. But it wouldn’t last. 
Sometimes by some single failure before 
temptation, sometimes by a_ gradual 
down-hill process, my best experiences 
would be lost, and I would find myself 
back on the lower levels. And a lower 
level is a perilous place for a man who 
calls himself a Christian, as the Devil 
showed me over and over again. 

It seemed to me that it ought to be 
possible for me to live habitually on a 
high plane of close fellowship with God, 
as I saw certain other men doing, and 
as I was not doing. Those men were 
exceptional, to be sure; they were in the 
minority among the Christians whom I 
knew. But I wanted to be in that 
minority. Why shouldn’t we all be, and 
turn it into a majority? 

2. Another conscious lack of my life 
was in the matter of failure before be- 
setting sins. I was not fighting a win- 
ning fight in certain lines. Yet if Christ 
was not equal to a winning fight, what 
were my Christian beliefs and profes- 
sions good for? [I did not look for 
sinlessness. But I did believe that I 
could be enabled to win in certain 
directions habitually, yes, always, instead 
of uncertainly and interruptedly, the vic- 
tories interspersed with crushing and hu- 
miliating defeats. Yet I had prayed, oh, 


5 


so earnestly, for deliverence; and the 
habitual deliverance had not come. 

3. A third conscious lack was in the 
matter of dynamic, convincing spiritual 
power that would work miracle-changes 
in other men’s lives. I was doing a lot 
of Christian work—had been at it ever 
since I was a boy of fifteen. I was going 
through the motions—oh, yes. So can 
anybody. I was even doing personal 
work—the hardest kind of all; talking 
with people, one by one, about giving 
themselves to my Saviour. But I wasn’t 
seeing results. Once in a great while 
I would see a little in the way of result, 
of course; but not much. I didn’t see 
lives made over by Christ, revolutionized, 
turned into firebrands for Christ them- 
selves, because of my work; and it 
seemed to me I ought to. Other men 
did, why not I? I comforted myself 
with the old assurance (so much used by 
the Devil) that it wasn’t for me to see 
results; that I could safely leave that to 
the Lord if I did my part. But that 
didn’t satisfy me; and I was sometimes 
heart-sick over the spiritual barrenness 
of my Christian service. 

About a year before I had begun, in 
various ways, to get intimations that 
certain men to whom I looked up as 
conspicuously blessed in their Christian 


6 


service seemed to have a conception 
or consciousness of Christ that I 
did not have—that was beyond, bigger, 
deeper, than any thought of Christ 
I had ever had. I rebelled at the 
suggestion when it first came to me. 
How could any one have a better idea of 
Christ than 1? (I am just laying bare to 
you the blind, self-satisfied workings of 
my sin-stunted mind and heart.) Did 
I not believe in Christ and worship Him 
as the Son of God and one with God? 
Had I not accepted Him as my personal 
Saviour more than twenty years before? 
Did I not believe that in Him alone was 
eternal life, and was I not trying to live 
in His service, giving my whole life to 
Him? Did I not ask His help and guid- 
ance constantly, and believe that in Him 
was my only hope? Was I not cham- 
pioning the very cause of the highest 
possible conception of Christ, by con- 
ducting in the columns of The Sunday 
School Times a symposium on the Deity 
of Christ, in which the leading Bible 
scholars of the world were testifying to 
their personal belief in Christ as God? 
All this I was doing: how could a higher 
or better conception of Christ than mine 
be possible? I knew that I needed to 
serve Him far better than I had ever 


7 


done; but that I needed a new conception 
of Him I would not admit. 

And yet it kept coming at me, from 
directions that I could not ignore. I 
heard Jowett of England preach a ser- 
mon on Ephesians 4:12, 13: “Unto the 
building up of the body of Christ: till 
we all attain unto the unity of the faith, 
and of the knowledge of the Son of God, 
unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure 
of the stature of the fulness of Christ’; 
and as I followed it I was amazed, be- 
wildered. I couldn’t follow him. He 
was beyond my depth. He was talking 
about Christ, unfolding Christ, in a way 
that I admitted was utterly unknown to 
me. Whether Jowett was right or wrong 
I wasn’t quite ready to say that night; 
but if he was right, then I was wrong. 
And I came away realizing that I had 
heard what was to me the most wonder- 
ful sermon I had ever listened to. 

A little later I read another sermon 
of Jowett’s, in the Record of Christian 
Work, on “Paul’s Conception of the Lord 
Jesus Christ.” As I read it, I was con- 
scious of the same uneasy realization 
that he and Paul were talking about a 
Christ whom I simply did not know. 
Could they be right? If they were right, 
how could I get their knowledge? 

One day I came to know Dr. John 

Q 


Douglas Adam, who speaks the closing 
message of the convention to you to- 
night. I learned from him that what he 
counted his greatest spiritual asset was 
his unvarying consciousness of the actual 
presence of Jesus. Nothing bore him 
up so, he said, as the realization that 
Jesus was always with him in actual 
presence; and that this was so, indepen- 
dent of his own feelings, independent of 
his deserts, and independent of his own 
notions as to how Jesus would manifest 
His presence. Moreover, he said that 
Christ was the home of his thoughts. 
Whenever his mind was free from other 
matters, it would turn to Christ; and he 
would talk aloud to Christ when he was 
alone—on the street, anywhere—as 
easily and naturally as to a human friend. 
So real to him was Jesus’ actual presence. 

Some months later I was in Edinburgh, 
attending the World Missionary Con- 
ference, and I saw that Dr. Robert F. 
Horton was to speak to men Sunday 
afternoon on “The Resources of the 
Christian Life.’ His book on “The 
Triumphant Life” had helped me greatly, 
and I went eagerly to hear him. I ex- 
pected him to give us a series of definite 
things that we could do to strengthen our 
Christian life ; and I knew I needed them. 


9 


But his opening sentence showed me 
my mistake, while it made my heart 
leap with a new joy. What he said was 
something like this: 

“The resources of the Christian life, 
my dear friends, are just Jesus Christ.” 

That was all. But that was enough. 
I hadn’t grasped it yet; but it was what 
Paul, and Dr. Jowett, and Dr. Adam, 
were trying to tell me about. Later, 
as I talked with Dr. Horton about my 
personal needs and difficulties, he said, 
earnestly and simply, “Oh, Mr. Trum- 
bull, if we would only step out upon 
Christ in a more daring faith, He could 
do so much more for us.” 

Before leaving Great Britain I was 
confronted once more with the thought 
that was beyond me, a Christ whom I did 
not yet know, in a sermon that a friend 
of mine preached in his London church 
on a Sunday evening, a young Welsh 
minister, the Rev. Richard Roberts. His 
text was Philippians 1:21, “To me to 
live is Christ.” It was the same theme— 
the unfolding of the life that is Christ, 
Christ as the whole life and the only life. 
I did not understand all that he said, and 
I knew vaguely that I did not have as my 
own what he was telling us about. But I 
wanted to read the sermon again, and I 


Io 


brought the manuscript away with me 
when I left him. 

It was about the middle of August 
that a crisis came with me. I was at- 
tending a young people’s missionary con- 
ference, and was faced by a week of 
daily work there for which I knew I was 
miserably, hopelessly unfit and incompe- 
tent. For the few weeks previous had 
been one of my periods of spiritual let- 
down, not uplift, with all the loss and 
failure and defeat that such a time is 
sure to record. The first evening that I 
was there Bishop Oldham, of India, 
spoke on the Water of Life. He told us 
that it was Christ’s wish and purpose 
that every follower of His should be a 
wellspring of living, gushing water of 
life all the time to others, not intermit- 
tently, not interruptedly, but with con- 
tinuous and irresistible flow. We have 
Christ’s own word for it, he said, as he 
quoted, “He that believeth on me, from 
within him shall flow rivers of living 
water.” He told how some have a little 
of the water of life, bringing it up in 
small bucketfuls and at intervals, like the 
irrigating water-wheel of India, with a 
good deal of creaking and grinding, while 
from the lives of others it flows all the 
time in a life-bringing, abundant stream 
that nothing can stop. And he de- 


II 


scribed a little old native woman in the 
East whose marvelous ministry in wit- 
nessing for Christ put to shame those of 
us who listened. Yet she had known 
Christ for only a year. 

The next morning, Sunday, alone in 
my room, I prayed it out with God, as 
I asked Him to show me the way out. 
If there was a conception of Christ that 
I did not have, and that I needed be- 
cause it was the secret of some of these 
other lives I had seen and heard of, 
a conception better than any I had yet 
had, and beyond me, I asked God to 
give it to me. I had Richard Roberts’ 
sermon with me, “To me to live is 
Christ,” and I rose from my knees and 
studied it. Then I prayed again. And 
God, in His long-suffering patience, for- 
giveness, and love, gave me what I asked 
for. He gave me a new Christ—wholly 
new in the conception and consciousness 
of Christ that now became mine. 

Wherein was the change? It is hard 
to put it into words, and yet it is, oh, 
so new, and real, and wonderful, and 
miracle-working in both my own life 
and the lives of others. 

To begin with, I realize for the first 
time that the many references through- 
out the New Testament to Christ in 
you, and you in Christ, Christ our life, 


I2 


and abiding in Christ, are literal, actual, 
blessed fact, and not figures of speech. 
How the 15th chapter of John thrilled 
with new life as I read it now! And 
the 3rd of Ephesians, 14 to 21. And 
Galatians 2:20. And Philippians 1: 21. 

What I mean is this: I had always 
known that Christ was my Saviour; but 
I had looked upon Him as an external 
Saviour, one who did a saving work for 
me from the outside, as it were; one who 
was ready to come close alongside and 
stay by me, helping me in all that I 
needed, giving me power and strength 
and salvation. But now I knew some- 
thing better than that. At last I realized 
that Jesus Christ was actually and 
literally within me; and even more than 
that: that He had constituted Himself 
my whole life (save only my resistance 
to him), my body, mind, soul, and spirit; 
my very self. Was not this better than 
having Him as a helper, or even than 
having Him as an external Saviour: to 
have Him, Jesus Christ, God the Son, as 
my own very life? It meant that I need 
never ask Him to help me again, as 
though He were one and I another; but 
rather simply to do His work, His will, 
in me and with me and through me. 
My body was His, my mind His, my will 
His, my spirit His; and not merely His, 


13 


but literally a part of Him; all he asked 
me to say was, “I have been crucified 
with Christ, and it is no longer I that 
live, but Christ liveth in me.” Jesus 
Christ had constituted Himself my life— 
not as a figure of speech, remember, but 
as a literal actual fact, just as literal, just 
as actual, as the fact that a certain tree 
had constituted itself this desk on which 
my hand rests. For “In Him were all 
things created, . . . and in Him all 
things consist”; and we are a part of 
the body of Christ. 

Do you wonder that Paul could say 
with tingling joy and exultation, “To 
me to live is Christ’? He did not say, as 
I had mistakenly been supposing I must 
say, “To me to live is to be Christlike,” 
nor, “To me to live is to have Christ’s 
help,’ nor, “To me to live is to serve 
Christ.” No; he plunged through and 
beyond all that in the bold, glorious, 
mysterious claim, “To me to live ts 
Christ.” I had never understood that 
verse before. Now, thanks to His gift 
of Himself, I am beginning to enter into 
a glimpse of its wonderful meaning. 

And that is how I know for myself 
that there is a life that wins: that it 
is the life of Jesus Christ; and that it 
may be our life for the asking, if we 


14 


let Him—in absolute, unconditional sur- 
render of ourselves to Him, our wills to 
His will, making Him the Master of our 
lives as well as our Saviour—enter in, 
occupy us, overwhelm us with Himself, 
yea, fill us with Himself “unto all the 
fulness of God.” 

What has the result been? Did this 
experience give me only a new _ intel- 
lectual conception of Christ, more inter- 
esting and satisfying than before? If it 
were only that, I should have little to tell 
you to-day. No; from that hour to 
this it has meant a revolutionized, funda- 
mentally changed life, within and with- 
out. If any man be in Christ, you know, 
there is a new creation. 

Do not think that I am suggesting any 
mistaken, unbalanced theory of perfec- 
tion or sinlessness in what I have been 
saying. The life that is Christ reveals 
to a man a score of sins and failures in 
himself where he only saw one before. 
He is still left the free will to resist 
Christ; and my life, since the new ex- 
perience of which I speak, has recorded 
shamefully many failures and sins of such 
resistance. But, men, the fighting has 
been on higher levels than it ever used to 
be; and the restorations after failure are 
wonderfully blessed and complete— 


15 


made so, I think, by “keeping short 
accounts with God.” , 

The three great lacks or needs of 
which I spoke at the opening have been 
miraculously met. 

1. There has been a sustained fellow- 
ship with God utterly different from 
and infinitely better than anything I 
had ever known in all my life before. 
Christ has permitted no extended, dreary 
fluctuations or barren intervals in my 
spiritual life. 

2. There has been habitual victory over 
certain besetting sins—the old ones that 
used to throttle and wreck me. There is 
yet infinitely much ground to be occupied 
by Christ; of that I am more painfully 
aware than I ever used to be; and I 
know, also, that there is in my life, as 
Bishop Oldham said, “a vast area of un- 
discovered sin” that I have not let Him, 
as I must by ever completer surrender 
and obedience, even open my eyes to. 
But many of the old constant and sicken- 
ing, soul-destroying failures are done 
away with by Him, and, as I have faith 
to believe, forever. 

3. And, lastly, the spiritual results in 
service have given me such a sharing of 
the joy of Heaven as I never knew was 
possible on earth. Six of my most in- 
timate friends, most of them mature 


16 


Christians, have had their lives com- 
pletely revolutionized by Christ, laying 
hold on Him in this new way and receiv- 
ing Him unto all the fulness of God. 
Two of these are a mother and a son, 
the son a young business man twenty-five 
years old. Another is the general man- 
ager of one of the large business houses 
in Philadelphia. Though consecrated and 
active as a Christian for years, he is now 
letting Christ work out through him in a 
new way into the lives of his many as- 
sociates, and of his salesmen all over the 
country. A white-haired man of over 
seventy has found a peace in life and a 
joy in prayer that he had long ago given 
up as impossible for him. Life fairly 
teems with the miracle-evidences of what 
Christ is willing and able to do for other 
lives through any one who just turns 
over the keys to His complete indwelling. 

Jesus Christ does not want to be our 
helper; He wants to be our life. He 
does not want us to work for Him; He 
wants us to let Him do His work through 
us, using us as we use a pencil to write 
with. 

When our life is not only Christ’s, 
but Christ, our life will be a winning 
life: for He cannot fail. But, remember, 
a life cannot win unless it serves. A 
prize-fighter may win, but he does not 


17 


serve. It is only a small part of life, and 
a wholly negative part, to overcome: we 
must bear fruit in service if we would 
really enter into life and the joy of the 
life that is Christ. If we are not bearing 
fruit, constantly and habitually, as a life- 
habit, we cannot ever do the lesser thing 
of habitual winning. 

The conditions of thus receiving Christ 
as the fulness of the life seem to be 
three—after, of course, complete confes- 
sion of sin and our personal acceptance 
of Christ as our Saviour from the guilt, 
power, and consequences of our sin. 
1. Absolute and unconditional surrender 
to Christ as Master of all that we are 
and all that we have. 2. Asking God for 
this gift of the fulness of Christ as our 
life. 3. Believing, then, that God has 
done what we have asked—not will do, 
but has done it. Upon this third step, 
the quiet act of faith, all may depend. 
Faith must be willing to believe God in 
entire absence of any feeling or evidence. 
For God’s word is safer, better, and 
surer than any evidence of His word. 

And remember that Christ Himself is 
better than any of His blessings; better 
than the power, or the victory, or the 
service, that He grants. God creates the 
electricity that drives cars, and carries 
messages, and lights our houses; but God 


1& 


is better than electricity. Christ creates 
spiritual power; but Christ is better than 
that power. He is God’s best; He is 
God; and we may have this best: we may 
have Christ, yielding to Him in such com- 
pleteness and abandonment of self that 
it is no longer we that live, but Christ 
liveth in us. Will you thus take Him? 





